IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday that things are looking up for Europe, and she expects economic growth next year.

“From having had quarters and quarters of negative growth, we are seeing progress next year,” she said. “I don’t want to use the green shoots analogy, but we’re seeing some positive news on that front.”

Many people have suggested that the IMF itself is partially responsible for the long-lasting European recession, and that it was too slow to respond to the crisis in Greece among other Southern European countries.

Yet Lagarde told Amanpour that she did not think they had dropped the ball.

“It was a question of when and how do you cut the arm,” she said, “and how do you stop contamination from possibly putting the whole system down.”

In other words, in a nose-diving plane, please put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you.

Militants from al-Qaeda's Somali offshoot, al-Shabaab, are in a continuing standoff with police at a Kenyan shopping mall – so what is their aim?

Christiane Amanpour spoke with CNN’s Nima Elbagir from on the ground in Nairobi.

“Their avowed aim – the aim that they speak about publicly,” Elbagir said, “is that they want to discourage the Kenyan public from supporting the Kenyan government and its continued presence in Somalia, where the Kenya defense forces are part of that African Union force helping to prop up the – we can call it still quite-shaky Somali government.”

“When Kenya went in,” she told Amanpour, “that was really when the tide turned against al-Shabaab.”

Click above to see Amanpour and Elbagir’s full explanation of the situation in Nairobi.

The head of the World Food Programme says that far from being a side issue, food security is itself security, and is key to a solution to the conflict in Syria.

“When people are hungry, when a mother or father is facing a child that they can't feed, you can't ask that family to lay down their arms,” Ertharin Cousin, executive director of the World Food Programme, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

“They won't, because the one thing a family is going to fight for is the ability to save their children. And we know that food is required to save a child's life,” Cousin said. “So providing the food assistance that's necessary is a big part of ensuring that the parties will continue to work towards a sustainable political solution.”